this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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This is the shit about "rational" thinking that pisses me off.
you start with a premise that sounds reasonable: "Wouldn't it be good if future generations were better off than their parents?"
Then you throw out all the hard parts of the question like:
Then you ignore all of history, pretend it's just a surface level question of technical ability and the only objections people have must be because they're stupid.
And voi-French noises you have yet another position to be smuggly superior in.
Like fuck, we do this to other animals and we get fucking sheep that die if you don't sheer them and get infections around their bum, chickens with a fifth the lifespan of their ancestors, chickens that grow so fast their legs sometimes break, dogs so fucking inbred they are a mess of health problems.
Maybe you could take a lesson from this about how fucking awful we are at deciding what traits are desirable and how twisted the logic of capital is. Or nah? maybe people who think a few random rich shits deciding on the perfect human will go about as well as other high modernist ideas are just idiots. That must be it.
Seems to me that this is all swimming in the same water as End of History and anti-politics: defining humans and humanity out of the problem space, and insisting that in order to be taken seriously you must be focused only on productivity, good governance, and technological progress, the only problems.
Yeah there's a book I quite like called seeing like a state. The author is an anthropologist who spent a lot of time studying SEA people living in the margins of states and non state areas as the state tried to bring them to heel.
In this book he coins the term "high modernism" to talk about this style of thinking wherein problems are simply matters of technical expertise and can, and should, be solved by abstract design from the centre and this design should be inflexible (because it is ideal).
While this kind of eugenics and sundry stuff isn't exactly the same I think it shares lots of characterists: The idea that you can solve real problems by sitting in a chair, the ignorance of how ideologically motivated you are and how heavily aesthetics features in your motivation (e.g. here they are far more concerned with the aesthetic of rows of healthy, pretty children doing well on tests than any of the messy details. Such as whether this is actually particularly useful in a world where many people suffer illness or disability merely because they are not given access to proper care), and the dismissal of other's reservations as a sort of "peasant ignorance" which in this case is highlighted by the notion it's merely the scary thoughts at the word holding people back, as if eugenics were some phantom we cower at in ignorance.
Anyway moral of the story read the book it's good. Weirdly rationalists also sometimes read this book and take all the wrong lessons from it. Stuff like "wow it was bad to supplant traditional agriculture because it yielded just as well or better than western" instead of "Oh their obsession with rational farming made them completely blind to reality including the enormous human cost of their authoritarianism"
Scott Alexander is a crypto-reactionary and I think he reviewed it as a way to expose his readers to neoreactionary ideas under the guise of superficial skepticism, in the same manner as the anti-reactionary FAQ. The book's author might be a anarchist but a lot of the arguments could easily work in a libertarian context.
Idk if I'm steeped in enough siskind lore. How did he frame it?
Also James Scott is not an anarchist, or at least wasn't at the time he interviewed about writing "three cheers for anarchism" anyway. He is very sympathetic though as is typical in anthropology.
iirc he basically agrees with the tennents but thinks states are unlikely to be defeatable.
Here's the old sneerclub thread about the leaked emails linking Scott Alexander to the far right
Scott Alexander's review of Seeing Like A State is here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
The review is mostly positive, but then it also has passages like this:
and
[citation needed]for some reason the phrase “as a socialist, there’s nothing I love more than banks” is cracking me up in ways that are going to be very difficult to explain to the people around me right now if I’m asked to explain why I’m giggling